Since starting college, I don't write handwrite my notes. Well, at least not the pencil to paper kind (thank God for an iPad). However, for my WRI340 class, we needed to have a daybook to keep track of our notes and thoughts. The catch? It needed to be handwritten.

I think we can all agree how handwriting causes panic in two ways: when the professor goes too fast and when you are a perfectionist (like me) who struggles with 'messy' notes. However, this semester taught me a few things about the benefits of a daybook.

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Writing notes by hand made me emphasize certain text. In my notes, I would put important phrases in all caps, such as "CHOICE IS IMPORTANT!" for when composers are making new pieces of art. In this case, composers need to chose the right color font, size, etc. to appeal to their audience. Later on in my daybook, I became more comfortable with using colors where I highlighted certain phrases in definitions like, "Genre convention occur in the form of genre, function, and content. 

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Most importantly, my daybook taught me how to examine things topics more critically. In particular, during the film Black Mirror, I broke the video into two categories: individual and cultural consequences, and the side effects of going into a fully digital age. In doing so, I saw myself looking for examples in the video more closely than I would have initially done when writing my notes on a computer. 

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